As a business owner, it’s natural to look at what your competitors are doing on social media and thinking… “I need to be doing that”. But remember the one thing that sets you apart from your competitor is the way you work. The way you do business… What you stand for and how you do things. So, we don’t want to look to a competitors social media to mirror what they are doing. Instead look at it for guidance and learn from it.

How can you do that? Well here’s 3 things you can learn from looking at a competitor’s social media account.

1. What your ideal customer wants to know about

First stop on a competitor’s social media is to dive straight into the comments of posts… See what questions people are asking. That is a HUGE pot of gold when it comes to crafting out your own content plan. Because if you can see people are asking “how do I add text to Instagram stories?” (for example!) then guess what… Making that piece of content is going to hand, on a silver platter, exactly what your audience wants to know!

So grab a pen and bit of paper and note down all those questions!

2. What type of content is getting good engagement?

You can learn a lot about what is working and what isn’t working with regards to content type. And execution. So ok, you can’t see blog stats… But you can see video views of YouTube and IGTV. You can see likes and comments (although remember these are vanity metrics), but if gives a good steer as to what is performing well and what you should perhaps avoid.

3. What platforms are worth using

Similarly, you may notice that people are loving video tutorials on the feed, but your competitor has not capitalised on YouTube yet… So, you could corner that opportunity.

Likewise, if you notice they’re spending a lot of time on Twitter, for example, and the tweets are getting zero engagement… Well that is a platform to swerve.

So there you have it… 3 things you can pick up the next time your looking at your competitor’s social media accounts.